Nail’d Review

If you happened to be a good racing game, you most likely were released in the past 2-3 years. While racing games were good before, and hopefully after, these last few years have seen an exceptional amount of exciting and original racing games released in the market. In the past, it was all about the GTs or the Need for Speeds, now with every new game you have a unique feature that is screaming “BUY ME”. Along came Nail’d with its promise of a rich, fast arcade racing experience. The potential is there, but how well did this one perform?

The promised features at least are there. The game is super fast. Racing around with your ATV or MX in some pretty bizarre tracks is a ton of fun in such high speed, well at least for the first few races. After playing the game again and again, that sense of speed just starts to fade away. The main reason behind that could be the graphics. While beautiful, the graphics just is not consistent enough and for some parts, it failed to catch up with the action going on around you. Another reason could simply be the inconsistent physics in this game.

Nail’d have one main mode for you to spend your time on, and that is, as you might have guessed, the career mode. Here you will race across every track in a tournament like battle to see who is the fastest, and may I add craziest, racer of them all. In order to add a little value to the game, once you have played every track, the game starts to throw at your different game styles in the same tracks. For example at one stage you will play each track with infinite turbo and see how that goes. Not exactly original, but at least they are trying. Right?

And that brings us to the turbo mode, which is an essential element in every game like this. Nail’d just do not know how to use such a feature to its advantage. Instead of adding more speed and excitement to the mix, when you click turbo all the colors around you disappear and the tracks just become unplayable. With so much going on around you, you expect the turbo mode to give you an advantage rather than be a handicap. And speaking of unplayable tracks, and as we mentioned earlier, the collision model in this game is as consistent as a launch day XBOX 360 console. Try driving into a rock 10 times. For some reason, 3 out of those 10 times you will simply bounce off that object. Even if you decide to drive safely and avoid off track hazards, you are bound to barely hit an item on the side and have to watch a massive crash occur before your eyes as you losing ground in the race of course.

Other then the career mode, this game comes with an online mode and some other single player modes that really will fail to catch on to you. The online game was relatively fun if you manage to find a bunch of people to play with you. The game ran smoothly on a couple of connections in the region, so lag-o-phobics should not worry about that here. Graphically, like we mentioned earlier this game is solid, just not when you are driving really fast, which you will be doing for 95% of your time with the game. The music includes some well known hits that you will feel familiar with, mainly because they were in some other recent games.

For some reason, everything about this game just does not feel like a full retail game. It is something between an XBLA title and a retail game. Maybe if the developers had removed a couple of features that did not add much to the game (I am sure they can find one or two in there) this could have been a very solid arcade game that many lazy gamers would have downloaded and enjoyed for a couple of days. With a full retail price tag though, and with so many excellent racing games out there, you defiantly have better options when it comes to this genre.